Frankie Avalon

WILDWOOD, N.J. — I expect Frankie and Annette to walk out of the Lollipop Motel. If you know who they are, you will know what I mean. If you are too young to remember them, you owe yourself a ride on a Doo Wop Back to the '50s tour, centered in the nation's capital of doo wop architecture, Wildwood, N.J., located in the big toe of the Garden State.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s about 300 futuristic mom and pop motels existed in this beach town then going through a tourism explosion. Today there are about 100. There may have been a Cold War going on, but in the world of pop culture, these were happy times, the innocent days of rock and roll. It was the era of Elvis and Marilyn,...

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WILDWOOD, N.J. — I expect Frankie and Annette to walk out of the Lollipop Motel. If you know who they are, you will know what I mean. If you are too young to remember them, you owe yourself a ride on a Doo Wop Back to the '50s tour, centered in the...

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"Grease" has been many things -- the word, a summer night, the one that you want -- for at least three distinct generations of theater and moviegoers. But in the years since 1971, when "Grease" premiered in Chicago at the Kingston Mines Theatre, it hasn't...

This story was originally published in the Chicago Tribune Sunday, April 24, 2011.
On this wet and frigid April morning, Jim Jacobs, the co-creator of "Grease," stands outside Taft High School on Chicago's Northwest Side. It feels like spring in...